See where RPA fits into your automation landscape
See where RPA fits into your automation landscape Download the RPA buyer’s guide
An elegant, synchronized environment for process automation
Based on a traditional hub-and-spoke architecture, IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere offers flexible, security-rich and centralized control consisting of three components — bot creators, control rooms and bot runners.

The dynamic power of bot creators

Only bot creators can create or edit bots. Because they build and test automation, they include powerful recording and editing capabilities. Among the recording features, you can use one of the built-in screen recorders to create bots quickly by capturing the keystrokes and mouse clicks you want the bot to replicate. You can also create or edit bots manually with the task editor, which offers hundreds of commands that make it easy for nontechnical users to create automated tasks and technical users to build more complex, integrated tasks.
Bot creator capabilities
- Record tasks for automation
- Create tasks manually
- Enhance and streamline tasks
- Debug tasks
- Scale tasks with metabots
- Automate even offline
- See task and workflow status
- View ROI over time
Get to know the bot creator environment
The central command of the control room
The control room is the center of your IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere environment. It’s where you authorize, control and manage bot creators and bot runners. Deploy, schedule, monitor, audit and manage your bots in real time for more reliable, scalable and secure execution. Manage access controls so that users can push hundreds of tasks to bot runners with one click. An intuitive visual interface delivers a seamless experience across devices and includes built-in predictive analytic dashboards — with a view into high-ROI bots and bots at risk of failure — and a notification area with the ability to set alerts requesting action.

Control room capabilities
- See tasks in progress
- Schedule bots
- Manage bot versions
- Administer users and roles
- View active users
- Audit user and bot activity
- Monitor bot analytics
- Set alerts for possible action
Get to know the control room environment
The streamlined reliability of bot runners

Bot runners are software machines that run bots. They are the runtime systems that sit on desktops, data centers and cloud infrastructures. When your bot creator builds a bot, your bot runners can then run that bot at scale. Bots primarily run unattended using schedules or triggers. Once your bot creator builds and uploads a bot, a control room user can schedule and execute the bot on an authorized bot runner. You can also run bots that are attended on local desktops. In that case, an attended bot runner triggers a bot script through human intervention rather than through the control room scheduler.
Bot runner capabilities
- Launch new bots
- Operate bots at scale
- Run bots from control rooms
- Run bots locally
- Keep tabs on events
- Compile and review reports
Get to know the bot runner environment
See what else you get with IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere
Automation lifecycle management
Automation lifecycle management provides an enterprise-level governance framework to help you improve your automation development process. It forces bots to graduate through lifecycle stages however your organization defines them — for example, development, testing, acceptance and production. It also helps you manage compliance demands, such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 5 certification and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
Workload management
To support industrial-scale automation, IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere includes workload management. Much more than a queue management system, workload management has been designed from the ground up to meet your enterprise-level SLA demands by allowing your enterprise to manually prioritize high-value tasks and processes. Workload management also comes with built-in SLA calculators.
Citrix Automation with AISense
Citrix and similar security environments are image-based systems that don’t lend themselves easily to automation. In Citrix, a bot is only allowed to use mouse clicks and keystrokes, so automation choices are limited. AISense for Citrix scans the application image, identifies user interface (UI) elements and automatically creates the UI objects, which AI-powered automation dynamically connects.
Security
Helping to heighten security in IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere, the control room divides users into bot creators and bot runners, requiring a developer and business user to create and execute each bot. It also has role-based access controls where users must be assigned roles to prevent unauthorized use. Credentials are created in the control room, divided into lockers based on a user’s department and securely stored in a centralized credential vault.
Automation Anywhere Bot Store
The Automation Anywhere Bot Store is a marketplace for RPA bots that run on the Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform. To help accelerate your automation and RPA initiatives, find metabots with ready-to-deploy functionality. All bots contain process implementations crowdsourced from a diverse enterprise ecosystem and organized according to categories like process type and industry.
Read the executive summary about the RPA solution from IBM
Read the executive summary about the RPA solution from IBM Get the summary (PDF, 381 KB)
Stand-alone RPA versus RPA plus
What happens when you take IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere and combine it with additional capabilities? Your “stand-alone RPA” solution becomes “RPA plus.” So how do you decide which is best for your organization?
Stand-alone RPA provides a simple way to achieve automation. It’s good at speeding up your simple tasks that can be precisely documented and have a defined sequence of steps.
RPA plus is good at coordinating processes that are complex or have dependencies. It enables RPA to be used for your more complex, conditional actions that may involve multiple outcomes or decision-making.
See the possibilities of RPA plus

Bots + data capture
Let your bots understand a wider range of unstructured documents to help with data-rich scenarios.

Bots + workflow
Get your bots to coordinate their work with humans to run start-to-finish workflow processes.

Bots + decision-making
Make your bots more agile by letting them use the business decision-making skills of an expert.
For hardware and software details, get a requirements PDF
For hardware and software details, get a requirements PDF Visit the page to download
Get to know more products from the IBM Automation® platform
IBM Business Automation Workflow
Automate digital workflows — from straight-through processes to complex cases — on premises or in the cloud.
IBM Operational Decision Manager
Discover, capture, analyze, automate and govern rules-based business decisions on premises or in the cloud.
IBM Blueworks Live
Let diverse teams easily work together to document, analyze and improve business process mapping.